Back to the Books

A Bolivian father sadly surveyed his nation's seven universities, then made up his mind. "I don't want my son mixed up in politics, and I don't want him to be a bad engineer because of the lack of facilities or because of endless strikes. I know he will not come back, but at least his future is assured." So saying, he sent his son off to West Germany to college.

Many more Bolivian parents would do the same if they could afford it. In the past two years, enrollment at San Andres University in the Bolivian capital of La Paz has jumped from 2,700 to 6,400. The government, which fears San Andres as a hotbed of opposition, gives the school little money, and last year actually refused a United Nations grant. In Bolivia, the university presidents and deans are elected by councils divided fifty-fifty between students and professors. Communists have grabbed control of three universities outside La Paz and are reaching for the rest.

Bolivia is an extreme case. But higher education throughout Latin America has long been plagued by similar problems. Without enough money or facilities, often more concerned with politics than learning, the universities have failed to produce the large number of doctors, engineers and widely skilled people needed to develop their nations. Latin American educators are aware of the shortcomings, and in recent years have been engaged in a drive to improve and broaden the universities.

Older Than Harvard. Such universities as Peru's San Marcos and the University of Mexico (both established in 1551) are older by 85 years than Harvard. Founded by the Roman Catholic Church as adjuncts to the colonial empires of Spain and Portugal, they were in the beginning centers of relative enlightenment. But after the wars of independence in the early 19th century, they became part and parcel of the rigid social and political system that dominated Latin America through a long succession of tyrants. Not until after World War I did a wave of liberalism sweep the hemisphere.

At Cordoba University in Argentina, rioting students refused to obey the school's administrators and demanded a voice in running things. They asked for relaxed entrance requirements, looser attendance rules, the virtual elimination of tuition. To eliminate narrow-minded professors who preached the dogma of the oligarchs, they also called for review of professorial qualifications.

Flourishing Rebellion. Known as the "University Reform.'' the student movement swiftly spread the length of Latin America, only to be turned back on itself by new platoons of tyrants. Fearful of the universities as centers of rebellion, the new dictators slashed government funds, leaving schools staffed with underpaid, part-time professors to teach an ever-growing student body. Learning suffered, but rebellion flourished.

Only after World War II, when the dictators began to fall for good,* did the students--and some of their professors--think about getting back to the fulltime business of learning. By then it was not easy. At many universities, far-leftists had moved into control during the revolutionary years and provoked riots and strikes when their control was threatened. Even when the Reds were ousted from university councils, many students, some of them in their 30s and making a career of campus politics, fought against reforms that would send them back to their books.

Communists so dominated Caracas' Central University that officials of Venezuela's liberal government were virtually barred. In 1961 Red students burned the car of visiting U.S. Ambassador Teodoro Moscoso. But lately, determined groups of anti-Communists have regained ground; last month police were able to search the campus for paintings stolen by far-left terrorists from a traveling Louvre exhibition.

Less Time for Politics. Elsewhere, reform and order are also making gradual headway. Argentina's Cordoba has a dynamic new rector named Jorge Orgaz, who has launched a ten-year building plan. "We have less and less time for politics," he says. "The population is burgeoning, and the old careers are giving way to demands for training to deal with contemporary technical and scientific problems."

At Lima's San Marcos University,* Rector Luis Alberto Sanchez has wheedled more financial support from the government, has straightened out the administration of university-owned real estate to produce more revenues. In two years he has increased the number of fulltime professors from 63 to 320 (still not enough for 14,300 students), has introduced departments of sociology, psychology, and business and public administration, and is completing a new Institute of Tropical Diseases. "Yet all of this material progress will mean little," he says, "unless the students respond by concentrating their best effort on learning, and by paying less or no attention to political agitators in their midst." The results are coming in; in the past two years, attendance has increased 60%; exam grades are up by 20%.

On with the New. Despite cramped quarters and a meager budget, Rector Juan Gomez has broadened the University of Chile's scope to provide training for 135 specialized careers instead of the 38 offered when he arrived in 1959. At the University of El Salvador, students and professors joined to elect reformist Rector Fabio Castillo, who has used a $275,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant to turn the medical school into Central America's best. In Ecuador, the 400-year-old Central University of Quito last month signed an agreement under which the University of Pittsburgh will use an Alliance for Progress grant of more than $1,000,000 to strengthen the entire university program from top to bottom.

Outside the old readin'-and-riotin' tradition, new universities are springing up. To fill growing Mexico's need for well-trained men that the overcrowded, low-standard, left-riddled National University does not provide, businessmen in Monterrey in 1943 founded a nonpolitical, high-standard Institute of Technology. Today the institute boasts a crack teaching staff of 250, a professor-student ratio of 1 to 22, and a reputation as the finest engineering school in Latin America.

* The only dictators other than Castro are Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner and Haiti's Francois Duvalier.

* Where Richard Nixon was stoned and spat upon during his 1958 tour.

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